7 Malicious Ways Cities Are Excluding Homeless People, Rather Than Helping Them

Updated on February 15, 2023

• Chicago's O'Hare International Airport has transformed into a "dystopian" homeless encampment with makeshift tents and shelters set up throughout the terminals.
• Jessica Dubuar from Haymarket Center, an organization that serves the homeless at the airport, told CBS News that the number of homeless people seeking shelter in the airport is increasing every year due to the city's rising unhoused population and the lack of space at shelters. 
• In 2022, Haymarket counted 618 new homeless people at the airport — up 53 percent from 2021. In 2020, 65,611 residents of Chicago were experiencing homelessness.

• Collier Gwin, a San Francisco art gallery owner, faces charges of misdemeanor battery after a video of him spraying a homeless woman with a hose as she tried to sleep outside of his gallery surfaced on January 9th. 
• Mayor London Breed expressed disgust, saying the act reminded her of police using physical aggression against civil rights protestors in the 1960s.
• San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said: "The alleged battery of an unhoused member of our community is completely unacceptable. Mr Gwin will face appropriate consequences for his actions."

Homelessness in America

• The number of people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. was estimated at 580,466 in early 2020, and the number only grew during the pandemic. 
• Shelters have seen their waitlists grow concerningly high, with numbers doubling or tripling in some instances. The U.S. has a shortage of 7 million rental units for especially low-income renters.
• Large cities like San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles are feeling the crisis most intensely, with the growth of makeshift homeless camps getting national attention. 

7 Malicious Ways Cities Are Excluding Homeless People, Rather Than Helping Them 

1. Inclusive Benches That Are Anything But    

• Prison Policy Initiative has estimated that 40% of homeless youth belong to the LGBTQ+ community, but these rainbow benches do nothing to help their struggle. Instead, this architecture takes away a space where unhoused people could sleep. 

2. Targeting Key Shelter Locations

• Bridges are one of the only features of the urban landscape that offers a modicum of protection from the elements. Cruel grids of spikes prevent homeless populations from being sheltered from extreme heat, cold, rain, and snow.

3. Choosing Structural Violence Over Solutions

• Hostile architecture is deployed to prevent homeless people from utilizing public spaces and features to sleep. 
• “There’s a certain posture that you take when you are homeless. You lose your dignity,” Ivan Perez, who lives in a tent in Los Angeles, told The New York Times.  

4. Locking Benches at Night

• Cynical, exclusionary designs ensure that a city's infrastructure itself becomes a weapon against homeless populations, who are already marginalized in every possible way.

5. Destroying Homeless Tents

• Sabotaging, cutting, or disposing of homeless people’s tents is a vicious act that reduces the dignity and rights of those who rely on them for shelter.

6. Creating Dangerous Public Spaces

• In the short-sighted battle against homelessness, urban planners have made the city streets uglier, less practical, and more unsafe for everybody.

7. Creating Barriers to Sleep in Urban Centers

• Cities construct barriers in the areas of the city most conducive to rest and sleep for homeless populations, pushing them out from under shelter or awnings and onto the exposed pavement or alleyways. 

What are cities in your area doing to further marginalize homeless populations? Share your thoughts.

—Emma Kansiz

(Photo Credits: Bored Panda)